


mirror mirror

by shadoedseptmbr



Series: L'essai Et Repose [12]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Backstory, Depersonalization, Earthborn, Gen, ME2, canon related trauma, slight body horror, slight self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26837905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoedseptmbr/pseuds/shadoedseptmbr
Summary: So. Who are you?
Series: L'essai Et Repose [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937545
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	mirror mirror

_Not my face not my Who is that i don’t_

Aedan stared at the reflection in the locker room mirror. 

She reached a hand up and the reflection moved, too. A hand- long bony fingers and freckled back. Like hers but...clean. 

No knife scars. No starburst from the shattered glass of that smash and grab. Cuticles soft and pink instead of brown and thickened from picking as she grew up. No calluses or welding or circuitry burns earned hard. Still sore from the gunfight in the...hospital? Station? Where...

_And that face who is it’s not me_

She’d never been self conscious about her scars. Her eyebrow split against a table edge when she was six. The one through her lip from a sudden stop in a fast car. She’d had the one under her right eye since she was fourteen. 

From the fight that had made her run. 

A stupid bar fight over territory as the Reds pushed out turned into mayhem Dekka -eyes blown and blue from the sand trip- laughing hysterically as if the bottle she’d just slammed in Aedan’s face was the joke she’d been trying to tell forever. 

Her blood had soaked through the bar towel while Dekka laughed and Jorge pushed Dekka down, shouting and someone’s semiautomatic rattled. She’d pressed harder on the towel and seen stars. And the door lit up by neon. She ran, bounced off some creep, shoved past someone in a red hoodie who’d tried to grab her. Hit the door. 

Kept running. She’d earned that scar. It was payment for the sand. 

_Is it drugs am i high who is that who_

The crowd was thin, it had been raining. The fight had gotten loud. There were sirens...she’d ducked into an alley, tripped. Dropped the towel in a puddle next to a half eaten rat. Pushed up and out, into the sketchy stripmall that ran between Red territory and the parkway.

There was a ripped and tagged Systems Alliance poster glued to the window between the pop up church that gave out free meals if you knew a bible verse and a shuttered ice cream shop. She hadn’t seen it, then. She had seen the dull red Alta skycar with a rental sticker. Rentals were so fucking simple to jack, the computers like kiddie toys. Jesus wept, the tracker had a _light_ on it so it was easy to find under the rear bumper. 

She’d blown out of the city, a wad of tissues from the box on the console plastered against her face. Driven until the pain and the itching crackle of dried blood on her throat made her pull onto the first lonely turn off just before hills ran into Blue Ridge.

The bag laid over the passenger seat had a leather medikit and a bottle of whiskey stuffed on top of a dark blue coat with shiny buttons. No fancy medigel in the kit, but gauze and antiseptic _fuck it had burned_ and teeny little strips of tape. And tweezers, to pick the rest of the glass out. She’d used the rear view mirror to see herself, biting down on the leather, remembering the last time she’d left something in a wound. The last time she let herself run rabbit.

And fuck she’d never been pretty but at least she hadn’t looked like.... some sort of demon.

_God_ what were those...those lights?

_Who is that where am i this isn’t my face_

She’d used the whole pack of strips. And then crawled into the backseat with the whiskey, shoving a stack of colored paper and a box to the floor. 

_did it happen it happened it was real but it's gone i'm_

She could use another bottle of Anderson’s top shelf booze just about now. She used that clean white hand to probe the...lights. She could see the trembling fingers press on the skin, the angled jaw, the sharp cheekbones. She could….feel it. The lights under the split skin shone through the thin, cold fingers, turning them red and warm, too.

It hurt, sharp little stings like welding sparks in the chop shop. She’d had some scars from those too. 

_It can’t be me. It can’t._

She’d died. She’d _died._

She had pulled off some stupid insane shit and walked away a hundred times but being spaced in a breached suit a meter away from an exploding star cruiser was a solid fact of Death. She’d had no air. Every alarm in her armor had been blaring. One of them was a warning about the approaching gravity well.

She’d felt her lung implode. Maybe her heart will, now. Feels fit to. 

Two years, Taylor had said. Move on, Lawson had sniffed.

Was she a...there hadn’t been a heaven. She hadn’t _expected_ heaven, really, not with...She didn’t remember hell. _This might be hell_ That face looked like it was burning. Her jaw ached from clenching. The blunt pale pink fingernails curled in on the splits under her cheekbone and she felt the sear of tearing flesh before she stopped, a trickle of blood welling. Sliding. Down her jawline, to drip on the pristine locker room floor. 

_It was real. It was…_

It wasn’t her face. But she was behind it. In that blank canvas. In that wide, frightened gaze. 

Apparently. Who are you, scared rabbit?

She smeared the blood away with her thumb. The tear was tiny, compared to the hurt. Already clotted.

“Commander, if you could please join us. The Illusive Man would like to speak with you.” Lawson’s voice paused. “At your leisure, of course.”

Figure it out later. Armor up.

Shepard dropped her hand and picked up the gauntlet she’d fumbled a moment ago, strapped it in place. Staring into flat, cold eyes she almost recognized. 

A minute later she strolled out of the locker room to stand at Lawson’s shoulder. “You got the freckle on the left temple an eighth of a centimeter too close to the eyebrow.”


End file.
